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Can you name a place where you think things do work? Put another way -- a place where that isn't struggling with some form of large scale, systemic coordination problems?
This isn't meant as a counter to your post. I'm seeking clarification about your pov.
USA works in most respects, having a healthy well-rounded economy, resource independence and food/energy/everything security, affordability of goods and housing, and protection of rights (especially negative rights, which are poorly comprehended by European legal systems), retaining its unrivaled attractiveness for world-class talent and the virtuous cycle leading it to hegemony. Days when the EU could be seriously discussed as a peer partner/competitor are far behind us, now it's just a poor brain-drained province.
Taiwan works in most respects, having a humane culture (by East Asian standards, and very much unlike the Mainland), functional democracy and some capacity to innovate in governance, good affordable healthcare, and an economy that benefits from virtual monopoly on the most valuable industry near the top of the global supply dependency graph.
Israel works in nearly every respect, especially considering geopolitical, natural resource etc. challenges it faces; it's truly jarring how its dubious liberal creds are emphasized by lobbyists and sycophants, yet nobody among policymakers cares about its most unlikely successes, unthinkable in the EU (chiefly, the ability to harmonize the economy of a first-tier developed country with tradition and reproduction). Pretty much all bad things about their system are either inherent to the ethnostate model (which is non-negotiable) or not very concerning to locals (bad visual design, accelerating shift towards right-wing ideology).
Those are, I think, the most successful and well-run countries on the planet, insofar as we leave aside European anomalies like Liechtenstein and other memes.
Within the EU, there are also more and less well-run «real» states, e.g. Finnish policymaking is, from what I can tell, generally devoid of bizarre unforced errors or even causes for culture war outrage (@Stefferi is that your handiwork?), but they're not that impressive or globally significant.
Ah, I see. I classify the EU much like Thiel does, as in, that it's a place where the dominant spirit is "indeterminate, negative." I don't have high hopes for its future, even in the near term (10-20 years), but I would still argue that if you're looking for a sleepy little hamlet, the EU is full of them--you get your healthcare and basic security, and you're free to live out your life in the style of Mann's Hans Castorp.
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ASML (which is Dutch) is upstream of TSMC on the dependency graph, and has a stronger monopoly. Right now nobody else is even trying to compete in EUV, and ASML have about an 80% market share in new wet DUV installations (the previous generation of photolithography tech).
ASML is valued like 50% less (it shouldn't be, though); in terms of revenue, TSMC is closer to Apple than to ASML. Also TSMC is only the frontrunner of an entire pleiad of electronic businesses (admittedly more replaceable) – from Asus to Foxconn to Mediatek to Synology, they control many world-class enterprises.
Europeans have a few more extremely successful and entrenched legacy companies of that sort (Zeiss etc.), and of course they're strong in other fields (e.g. pharmaceuticals), but AFAIK no European nation has such an impressively high-tech export structure, pound for pound.
Plus Europeans have other problems. The Dutch, for instance, have imported roughly a quarter of their current population, which the Taiwanese would not even consider.
Hi, imported Dutch here. There are quite a lot of foreigners here for sure (and many aren't very desirable), but these numbers that people throw around are very disingenuous. It typically includes anyone with any parentage from "abroad". Have a Belgian mom? German expat? Fully assimilated and very productive n-th generation Surinamese immigrant? Congratulations you are padding the foreigner statistics. Numbers look especially grim since most locals I know don't think twice about dating a culturally equivalent "foreigner".
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Shh...
I think that one of the things here is that when people discuss Europe's problems, it is often some sort of a melange of individual country problems. Ie. the biggest issues with energy, including the disdain for nuclear, overreliance on non-European fossil fuels etc. do not affect all EU countries equally; not every country is Germany. EU, as an institution, just recently, classified nuclear as a green energy in its taxonomy.
Indeed. It is the inverse of what you'll find on blue-leaning fora, where Europe is a paradise with Mediterranean food and Dutch cycling culture and Nordic welfare states everywhere and the like. People who turn away from their blue peers reverse such stupidity, and see Europe as an amalgamated hell in much the same way.
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Most places have problems, because as soon as we humans can half-ass something, we move onto the next thing.
However, there are many places that have at least the basics right. E.g. Japan/Korea have less insane energy policies.
They also did not outsource their heavy industries to the revanchist communist dictatorship that's worryingly also at the moment the most populous nations.
They aren't engaged in crazy, innumerate attempts at a green 'transition'. Or importing large numbers of people known to be a drain on state finances.
But isn't this picking one set of trade offs for another?
Japan has been wrestling with economic stagnation, where more and more younger people have to bust their asses even more for an uncertain future. Many of them are choosing to completely drop out of society altogether. They're also struggling with low birth rates to the point of working on robotic elderly aides. Also, high suicide rates.
I'm sure if I did the research, I'd find a lot of trouble going on in Korea, too.
That said, I would take all the places we're talking about (USA, most of EU, Japan, Korea, and a few others) as having their shit together enough to be classified as "working." Sure, they're all facing wicked problems, but on the whole, they still exhibit behaviors that signal they are capable of playing the larger game.
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I wouldn't put Japan in the non-insane energy policy column. Have you seen their coal and LNG imports in the last decade? Their air quality must be getting awful from burning all that coal, and they're really paying the trade balance toll.
They went back to nuclear (stopped the phaseout) and want to build more.
Many European countries have also stopped their phaseouts and/or are planning to build more.
France is. Also Sweden. Nobody else big is building anything. Italy is very badly off relying on natgas- planning nothing. They're boned, as usual. Poland iirc has a small project to convert a defunct coal plant into nuclear, but it's very much one of those things that'll probably never happen beacause of endless delays and litigation by German environmentalists. Any attempt at Poland to say, pass a law about energy scarcity to prevent endless delaying objections would end up in Strasbourg and be probably deemed illegal, because judges are assholes who want to see the world freeze.
Germany hasn't done that much. Let me remind you that had they kept their nuclear fleet operating, they'd have no gas shortfall now whatsoever. IIRC like a third of their gas goes to electricity.
DE finally caved in and are going to let the three remaining plants operate, for a time.
They have three more iirc that could still be quickly brought back to operation. That's not planned to happen, yet. though I expect it may happen.
They're not planning new ones, or any conversion of fossil powered ones into nuclear.
Reactors actually under construction in Europe are really a very small category. One big in France, two small ones in Slovakia. That's it. A continent of 500 million, trying to phase out fossil fuels.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx
WNA has no section on plans, but like I said, only France and Sweden seems to want to construct a solid amount.
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Really? I'd have imagined that, being the country that suffered Fukushima, they'd have more strongly moved away from nuclear. Granted, Fukushima's worst effects had little to do with actual radiation leakage, but it was definitely a strong shock.
Japan is not a real democracy, hence, they can be rational about these things.
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If people generally abandoned entire technologies because of one horrific industrial accident, we'd likely given up fire some time in prehistory (after the first human-started forest or grass fire)
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